Classical CDs: Jelly Babies, porridge and kazoos

Brahms: Lieder Christian Gerhaher (baritone), Gerold Huber (piano) (Sony)

The concert I attended of Brahms Lieder in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford in October 2024, with Christian Gerhaher in fabulous voice and Gerold Huber at the peak of his craft was fabulous – five star review of that very special evening here. I was therefore overjoyed to discover only recently that they had made this recording of a very similar programme just one week before. The whole disc is a wonderful outpouring from a gloriously intelligent singer; maybe that’s all it’s necessary to know.

The programme is a fine juxtaposition of the familiar with the less familiar, and I have been often overjoyed to find unfamiliar gems. “Lerchengesang” from Op. 70 has a piano part which is not just ethereal, it keeps on stopping and starting while the singer holds his line, raising the teleological teaser of whether it has a purpose in actually being there. There are other talking-points of the album, notably a rarity, an early versions of the ‘Regenlied’ songs, the first of which Brahms repurposed in his first violin sonata. We also have the entire set of Op. 32, which takes the listener to some very dark and also some darkly chromatic places. 

The programme essay accompanying the disc, by Swiss-based musicologist Laurenz Lütteken is densely written and raises interesting questions. Lütteken notes that Brahms was still wrestling with the concept of “Volkston” (rendered as ‘folk style’ in the translation, it doesn’t quite cover it) which the philosopher Herder had propagated in the late eighteenth century. What interests me rather more is how Gerhaher himself has been revaluating Brahms. In the past he has declared more than slight ambivalence towards Brahms’s songs, and to the ‘folk’ aspect in particular. It stands in marked contrast to his complete identification with Schumann’s ‘art-song’ ethos. I have to guess then… and what I hear from the fact that Gerhaher goes straight in to six songs to folk texts, is that he is progressively overcoming his wariness towards the folk-ier side of Brahms, finding – perhaps, this is guesswork – that the persuasiveness of the melody of a song like “Vor dem Fenster” from Op. 14 actually brings its own rewards.

This is an important release. I still have a performance of a song not on this disc (“An eine Äolsharfe” a setting of Mörike which sang as the encore in the Sheldonian) ringing in my ears. And that encourages me to hope that there will be more chapters of the story of Gerhaher finding his peace with Brahms – something he has demonstrated persuasively on this disc – without the need actually to say it. Sebastian Scotney

Ralph Heidel: anyways.onto better things (Friend With Oranges)

Contemporary German composer Ralph Heidel’s anyways.onto better things is as unclassifiable as the album title might suggest; that the LP opens with “End Credits” and finishes with “A New Start” made me worry that the quirkiness might become irksome. I needn’t have worried; this is an enjoyable and entertaining album. Heidel enjoys blending incongruous elements, woozy synths mixed in with what sounds like a rickety upright piano, the various shufflings and intakes of breath left in the mix. “Shit Ton of Love” and “I’m Here, We’re Here” feature squelchy Stravinskian wind chords, Heidel overdubbed on saxophones and flute, and “If You Must Go” includes some appealingly retro synthesiser noises.

Individual tracks unfold at a stately but never soporific pace, the effect oddly consoling. Several interesting names make guest appearances: Japanese composer Jun Miyake adds an evocative trumpet solo to “Wake Up”, and cellist Marie Claire Schlameus provides sonorous chords in several numbers. Heidel’s production values are distinctive, a blend of sophistication and grit. An intriguing and entertaining album, the gleaming white vinyl LP edition especially so.

 Alex Paxton: Delicious Dreammusics Ensemble, Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain et al (New Amsterdam Records)

In 2023 I reviewed – and loved – Alex Paxton’s previous albums, on Nonclassical and Delphian, swept away by their energy, eccentricity and cartoonish hyperactivity. Delicious, his first release on the US New Amsterdam label, offers more of the same, and I am still here for it. Delicious is wild, untrammelled, odd, enticing and – on all parameters – turned up to 11. Paxton’s music has an infectious exuberance and carries itself lightly: it’s funny, both ha-ha and (in a good way) peculiar. The tracks are performed by four ensembles (Paxton’s own Dreammusics Ensemble, Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain, GBSR DUO and Explore Ensemble), having been commissioned by such august bodies as Ensemble Modern, the LSO and the Royal Philharmonic Society. They are diverse, but bound together by a strongly-defined compositional voice. The pieces here have a theme of confectionary, but this is not refined Swiss-chocolate music, this is the indecent sweetness of Jelly Babies and gaudy bubble-gum.

Touching Sweetly hockets and bops around, while Scrunchy Munchy is a jazzy rollercoaster-ride, with prominent trombone (Paxton’s own instrument) whereas Kite has a carefree pop-like riff. Shrimp BIT Baby Face is the biggest piece, at 19 minutes, and combines live players and electronics. It is a collage of noises, samples and extended instrumental techniques, described delightfully by the composer as “hanging out with your best friend, who you definitely don’t fancy. Not even a little bit.” It is intoxicating, and I think I might fancy the friend too. Dadd’s Fairies is more conventionally scored for acoustic instruments, but has the same coruscating ribbons of sound flying here and there. As if to re-state a commitment to the weird, Justgum Friends starts with a harpsichord and kazoo duet, and Yeasty Pets & Best Drums is like a going-back-to-primary-school dream, replete with recorder ensemble. The album finishes with the 10-minute Levels of Affection, my favourite track, which is rambling and extempore in its structure, by turns woozy and frantic on its surface, but a very satisfying whole.

I still hear the elements of free jazz, Ligeti and Aphex Twin I heard before, and I also was reminded of Øyvind Torvund’s wacky A Walk into the Future, which I reviewed last year. Above all I was swept along by Paxton’s inventiveness and energy, although as a listening experience it is somewhat exhausting, like a comedian who’s always “on”. Don’t try to treat this as background music: it demands – but then rewards – your full attention, even if you might need a palate-cleanser of some, say, Palestrina afterwards. Bernard Hughes

Ravel: Piano Concertos Yeol Eum Son (piano), Residentie Orkest Den Haag/Anja Bihlmaier (Naïve)

Francois Xavier Poizat’s recent box set collecting Ravel’s complete works with piano sets the bar pretty high in this repertoire, reassuring proof that great recordings of familiar music are still being made. Here’s another example, South Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son’s disc coupling the two concertos with a selection of Bach pieces arranged for left hand by Paul Wittgenstein, commissioner of the left-hand concerto. We’ll get to those later. Son’s take on the G major concerto glitters, her perceptive booklet essay reminding us how brittle Ravel’s keyboard writing is (“…seventy per cent of the piano part in both the first and last movements is akin to playing a drum…”). The clarity of the playing is startling, though it’s never clinical: sample Son’s spiky lead-in to the first movement recapitulation. She gets excellent support from Anja Bilhmaier’s Residentie Orkest, a very French-sounding principal bassoon deserving particular praise. The “Adagio assai” is cool but beautiful, perfectly paced, and the finale has panache, Ravel’s trombone glissandi just vulgar enough.

The Concerto for the Left Hand is another triumph, this gnarlier, darker work proof that “one hand alone is enough to conquer the world.” Listen to how delicately Son presents the concerto’s main theme after the opening flourish, and the dark humour she mines in the central 6/8 section. The slow climb out of the abyss at the concerto’s close has to be one of the greatest darkness-to-light passages in music, and it’s exhilarating here; what a masterpiece this work is. Four of Wittgenstein’s Bach transcriptions are intriguing and brilliantly played; Son’s performance of the BWV 999 C minor Prelude (originally composed for lute) splendidly gnarly, followed by a “Sicilliano” from the BWV Flute Sonata that’s all sweetness and light. A terrific disc, beautifully recorded.

Shostakovich: Piano Concertos + Solo Piano Works Yuja Wang (piano), Boston Symphony Orchestra/Andris Nelsons (Deutsche Grammophon)

 DG set the context by calling this disc a “fitting culmination” to the Shostakovich cycle from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons. Their 19-CD box is now neatly wrapped up, with three months to go until August which marks the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death. The First Concerto features lively conversation between piano, trumpet (BSO principal Thomas Rolfs, an Ozawa recruit from the early 1990s) and the strings. Pacing and balance – with the piano in the mix rather than out front – are superb, and Wang absolutely makes the most of the moments where the piano is free either to rush off or to contemplate. The finest moments are in the eerie beauty of the central ‘lento’ movement. At eight and a half minutes, it is the longest track on the disc. The slow ending is handled with particular beauty and a sense of poise and repose. Checking back for a comparison with Argerich’s astonishing Lugano recording from 2006, the Argentinian, balanced to dominate, finds more drama, more sardonic wit, more depth and more contrast in the work, particularly in the first movement.

According to Gerald McBurney, Shostakovich claimed that he “never intended [the Second Concerto] as a serious piece of music.” It is going to be interesting to see if the less serious side of Shostakovich comes to be valued more, or indeed less, in the forthcoming anniversary celebrations. My inclination is to predict that it will do well. The Festive Overture (it had its premiere on the eve of the day I was born, so I have an attachment to it!) will open the second half of this year’s Last Night of the Proms, and I hope that works like the Jazz Suites also get a proper airing.

In general, the Boston orchestra plays, as this column described one of the earlier recordings in this Shostakovich cycle with “depth and weight rather than edge and grit.” Yes, weight. This recording almost denies the lightness of the writing. I was surprised by the overwhelming orchestral numbers which Wang has to pit herself against in this recording of the second concerto. She must surely secretly envy Dmitri Alexeev who just had the English Chamber Orchestra to contend with when he turned up at St. John’s Smith Square to make his now-classic 1988 recording. These new concerto recordings were taped live in 2022 in Symphony Hall in Boston – the place where Yuja Wang made her career breakthrough as a 20 year old student step-in for Argerich. The disc also includes six short solo pieces – about eight minutes of music in total – from the “Preludes” (1932-33) and the “Preludes and Fugues” (1950-1). They were recorded later, and are played with a heavy belligerence that I found very off-putting, and a harshly bright sound. Sebastian Scotney

Hommages: music by Stravinsky, Mustonen, Golijov and Tabakova United Strings of Europe/Julian Azkoul (BIS)

Here’s another intelligent anthology from Julian Askoul’s multinational United Strings of Europe, this one “inspired by dreams and recollections of the past.” The big work is Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète in Azkoul’s new transcription for string sextet. Having the six musicians sat in a semicircle with the bassist in the centre gives each line space to breathe in a spacious church acoustic, and the results sound thoroughly idiomatic. If you prefer, say, Verklärte Nacht in its original scoring, you’ll like this, though the clarity and elegance of Stravinsky’s writing is worlds away from Schoenberg’s dense chromaticism. Sample the little “Variation de Polymnie”, the precision and wit of the playing difficult to resist, and the final bars of the “Apothéose” are gorgeous. This alone would justify purchasing the disc, and the couplings are interesting too. I’ll confess to having a limited knowledge of Einsteinian quantum light theory so struggled to relate the physics to Dobrinka Tabakova’s six-minute Organum Light, but the rich, sonorous string writing is immediately appealing.

Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round pays moving tribute to Golijov’s countryman Astor Piazzola, two sparring string quartets facing off with a bassist in the middle. The second movement’s “Muertes del Angel” closes with an elegiac fade, paying tribute to a great musician whose career was cruelly and unexpectedly ended by a stroke in 1990. We get two pieces by pianist and composer Olli Mustonen. Nonetto II is again scored for two quartets and bass, a four-movement symphony in miniature packing a huge amount into sixteen minutes. The work feels much bigger, the finale’s exultant closing bars suggesting Sibelius. Mustonen’s Apotheosis is a compact cello quartet composed in memory of Pablo Casals, the music alluding to Casals’ Catalan roots and his love of Bach. Imposing and deeply moving, it’s superbly performed.

Ainsley Hammill: Fable

Gaelic Scots singer and composer Ainsley Hammill’s Fable is a collection of folk songs and original material, six of the eleven tracks sung in Gaelic. Comparing the two languages side by side makes the English texts seem very prosaic; who wouldn’t rather hear Hammill sing “Cidh ‘n fidheall, far an fidheall” than “Fetch the fiddle, find the fiddle”? The traditional, non-English numbers are the ones I’ve returned to most often. “Beamer Puirt” races through four sea shanties in less than five minutes, each one faster than the last, the final song an exuberant rant about substandard porridge. Hammill’s whiplash delivery is impressive but she’s also convincing in the slower numbers. Try “Cumha an Eich-Uisige”, a lament from a shape-shifting water-horse pleading for his lost love to return.

Hammill’s "Machir Bay" takes inspiration from the Islay landscape, and "The Angel's Share" compares the evaporation of whisky with finding peace in solitude ("Distil my fears up here where it's high and cold/Where nobody goes"). An idiomatic take on Burns' "What Can a Young Lassie" is an effective coda. The song arrangements are invariably idiomatic, the studio production rich and warm. My one tiny gripe is that texts and translations are in impossibly small type, and you may need a magnifying glass to read them. Recommended.

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